High Sabbaths

This article is about a group of seven Biblical festivals. For Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur specifically, see High Holy Days. For Sabbath before Pesach, see Shabbat haGadol.

High Sabbaths, in most Christian and Messianic Jewish usage, are seven annual Biblical festivals and rest days, recorded in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. This is an extension of the term "high day" found in the King James Version at John 19:31–42.

Biblical rest days

The seven festivals do not necessarily occur on weekly Shabbat (seventh-day Sabbath) and are called by the name miqra ("called assembly") in Hebrew (Lev. 23). They are observed by Jews and a minority of Christians. Three of them occur in spring: the first and seventh days of Pesach (Passover), and Shavuot (Pentecost) which occurs in summer. Three occur in fall, in the seventh month, and are also called shabbaton: Rosh Hashanah (Trumpets); Yom Kippur, the "Sabbath of Sabbaths" (Atonement); and the first and eighth days of Sukkoth (Tabernacles). Sometimes the word shabbaton is extended to mean all seven festivals.

The Gospel of John says of the night immediately following Christ's burial that "that sabbath day was a high day" (19:31-42). That night was Nisan 15, just after the first day of Passover week (Unleavened Bread) and an annual miqra and rest day, in most chronologies. (In other systems, it was Nisan 14, i.e., weekly but not annual Sabbath.) The King James Version may thus be the origin of naming the annual rest days "High Sabbaths" in English.

As Coincidental with Weekly Sabbaths

High Sabbaths are considered by Seventh-day Adventists and other seventh-day Sabbath keepers to be a subset of the feast sabbaths. In their view, only those feast sabbaths that coincide with the weekly Sabbath are regarded as High Sabbaths.

High Holy Days

The ten-day period between the High Sabbaths of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur inclusive is commonly referred to as the High Holy Days.